Great Britain’s Joanna Rowsell, Dani King and Laura Trott smashed the team pursuit world record twice in one day as they defeated Australia for gold at the Track Cycling World Championships in Melbourne.
Both teams broke the record in qualifying but GB won the final in a record three minutes 15.720 seconds.
“I don’t know how we did that,” said King. “We rode a perfect race.”
Britain’s women were more than a second off the hosts’ pace for large parts of the final in front of a passionate Australian crowd, but closed the gap in a brilliant final kilometre to successfully defend their world title.
“It gives a really strong message that they’ve got to beat us now. We’ve not lost a competition since February last year and it’s going to be our track,” said Trott.
The British time took almost 2.5 seconds off the world record, the same trio set just two months ago at the Track World Cup inside London’s Olympic Velodrome.
“At the beginning of the race they were up on us quite a lot. Paul [Manning, their coach] was pulling us forward to go faster and we just dug in,” King told BBC Sport.
“We did a consistent ride and kept the speed going all the way to the end, which I think is our winning strategy.”
And Rowsell said, “A lot of the Australians were commenting after the World Cup in February that we had home support, but they had that here and we still beat them.
“In London we went out fast and came off a bit towards the end. We decided to go out steadier today and it paid off.”
Lizzie Flint, Sportsister
The Women’s Sports Magazine
Photo credit: British Cycling
